Hey there, so I haven’t put up a personal post in a long time and I thought that I ought to seeming how I’m long overdue.

Not really sure what to write about. The boys and I are doing okay. We’re still living with my parents, which for the most part is okay. There are pros and cons to that. On one hand it is nice having social supports in place but on the other it’s a constant struggle with boundaries. This is nothing new and I imagine anyone that has lived in a multi-generational home has run into this on some level. For me what is unique about it is I’m still mastering the whole concept of the boundaries thing. It’s my understanding that people don’t always respond well when you start setting new boundaries – especially when you had none before. Needless to say, things are up and down with that.

I think the hardest thing for me to deal with was hearing my father say to my face, “Fuck the law,” regarding parental visitation being a legal essential activity when the Stay Home Order went into place and he banned all visitors AND threatened to kick us out of his home if I made any attempt to allow my sons to see their fathers outside of the home only to rescind that decision a couple of months later when my parents started missing the birthday parties of their other grandchildren. I don’t have much respect anymore for people that not only don’t obey the law, but also don’t follow Universal Precautions. On top of all that both of them increased their policing of my movements and phone calls during this time. They’ve back off for now, but it took quite a bit of push back from me to get there. Needless to say the plan now is to come up with the income to move out.

It will be nice to have total privacy and to be able to live by only one set of rules again.

School is finally on vacation for the boys right now at least. Little Bear responded well to the remote learning during the spring semester, but we struggled to keep Tuxedo Cat from completely shutting down. Now they are talking about what they are going to do about school this coming fall. There is a hard push to reopen school fully. I realize that the numbers for Covid-19 aren’t that bad here in Maine, but my gut says this is still a bad idea logistically right now. I don’t believe our schools don’t have the staffing or the funding to keep our schools properly sanitized or socially distanced – especially our younger students. And don’t get me started with the logistics in trying to avoid cross contamination for the special ed department alone.

Just many concerns and the more I think about it, the more I lean towards homeschooling the boys. For now though I am just waiting to hear from the State Department of Education and our school district to see what their final plans are before I make my final decision. I hope that we will hear from them soon since the parent group for our school district is becoming more heated by the day.

Things between Golden Knight and I are going well. The more I dig into and work on Attachment Theory, the better I understand why I interact with the world the way I do and why I approach vulnerability and connection the way I do. It helps me to ask what is working and what isn’t working in the way I do things and why. Then I can ask myself how can I shift into a more functional behavior pattern.

It’s been helping with how I interact with the boys too. Like asking myself how to remain calm and not escalate when things become frustrating. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of choosing not to engage. For example, I’m in a Zoom call with my therapist and one son starts up with distracting behavior. I can choose to either engage with that during the call and try to get him to stop (which will likely make it worse and thus waste my call time), or I can choose to apologize for the distraction and focus on the call (and allow the behavior to die out on its own).

Little Bear is slowly learning that his behavior is in fact connected to outcomes. He is starting to understand that not everything is externally at fault. So, he is trying now to modify his behavior. There has been less screaming and more cooperation. He’s finding that as a result people are more pleasant with him and are willing to spend time with him more often. I honestly feared that this gap would never close so I’m really excited and proud to see this progress. Yes, we still have bad days but they are fewer and not as bad as they used to be. Watching him develop self-regulation skills is tremendous and a huge milestone. I don’t think I would be able to fully appreciate this as much as I do if I haven’t been doing the work I’ve been doing on myself.

I recently renewed my WordPress account back to business level, which allowed me to bring back plugins. One of the plugins I’m trying out is one for Patreon. In the description it says that it allows you to sync posts together on both sites, but it didn’t bring the images over to the blog from Paetron like it said it would. I don’t know yet if it will synch in the other direction since I haven’t tested it yet. I hope so. Juggling multiple sites has been a tremendous challenge for me, so I’m hoping to figure out a streamlined solution for this.

I would like to be doing more fiction writing. Not sure yet how I will be fitting that in with everything else that I’ve been doing. But honestly, I do miss that creative part of my life.

Speaking of creative, I’ve been mentioning in my mood trackers that I’ve been tinkering around with a datapack on Minecraft. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

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Still a lot of experimentation, tinkering, and building to do. This is all inspired by a collection of old building projects I did and shared on Planet Minecraft awhile back that I called Endonia. When I look back at those old builds now, I find myself wondering if I can convert them to the new NBT file format and update them for use in the datapack or if they are too large. I’m pretty sure that the temple build is too large with the way it is. It’s a shame because out of all my builds, I think it’s still my favorite one.

It’s my understanding that Mojang is updating the datapack in terms of worldgen in their current snapshot. I still don’t have everything they have right now figured out yet, but I’m hoping it means that soon custom biomes and custom placement of villages and structures will be possible with little fuss. I’m really happy as it is to see that we’re able to create these customizations without using a third party program.

Well, I think that’s it for the time being for today. Thank you so much for sticking around with me for so long. It does mean a lot to me. I hope you are all doing well during these stressful times and finding ways to cope. Feel free to drop me a line in the comments below to let me know how you’re doing and what sort of creative activities you’re doing to manage all that’s been going on.